Marin, Louis

Louis Marin, expert in semiotic analyses of art, has no painted portrait of himself to hold up to critical commentary. From the available photographs we cannot read him in the same fine detail and enlightened observations which he himself developed to read art pieces such as those of 17^th century painter Nicolas Poussin and which he described and articulated so eloquently in the essays of Sublime Poussin (posthumous, 1995). Nonetheless, in presenting (or rather re-presenting) the major themes that Marin studied and analyzed throughout his admirably extensive body of works, and in particular in Sublime Poussin, and in studies such as Le récit est un piège (The Story is a Trap, 1978) and Portrait du roi, (Portrait of the King, 1981) we can glean a depiction of a scholar-academician-semiotician-art historian who reveals repeatedly his fascination with “the relationships between power and representation…reformulated as two questions: what about power and its representation and, inversely, what about representation and its powers?” (Portrait of the King, 4). These were not simple inquiries for Marin, rather his curiosity in examining the interplay in a myriad of examples compelled him to propose a fundamentally novel way of seeing semiotically and philosophically into the subjects that he considers. On a simple level, he asked: what is there? On a far more complicated level, he wondered: what is not there?

His carefully crafted reflections established him as a philosopher; however, from his initial studies in the early 1960s, he is also recognized as a historiographer, keen art critic, semiotician and, having joined academic discussions through his studies on Blaise Pascal in 1963, among the most respected scholars on the 17^th century. His knowledge was shared through his academic appointments at Paris, London, San Diego, and Baltimore. Apart from his scholarly research, he also had the role of cultural counselor in Türkiye from 1961-1964, working for the Office of the French Ambassador there. A daunting presence for the knowledge that informed his opinions and perspectives, he was always generous in sharing his ideas, as friend and colleague Jacques Derrida pointed out in saying of Marin that

“I have never known anyone whose intelligence was so luminous and generous at the same time, immediately clear, brilliant, cheerful, always ready to communicate the enthusiasm of discovery and to give the impression of the first morning: awakening, amazed vigilance, immediately shared.”[1]

Derrida also observes that perhaps Marin has been under-represented among his peers, better known outside of France than in his home country.[2] That his friend should have been somewhat overlooked among important post-structuralist philosophers continued to preoccupy Derrida who returned to the topic of Marin’s absence in a later piece in Critical Inquiry, wondering:

“Who could ever speak of the work of Louis Marin?….Who could ever speak of all the work and works of Louis Marin?…What is, what will have been, what will still be tomorrow the energy of Louis Marin?”[3]

Who is this philosopher who won the admiration of Derrida and many others?

Marin was born at La Tronche near Grenoble in May 1931. Having completed his studies in Philosophy at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, he took up teaching positions at the Paris Nanterre University (1967-1970), moving then to the University of California at San Diego (1970-1974), and to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (1974-1977) where he later participated in the Humanities Center there as an Associate (1985-1992). He returned to teach in Paris at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 1977, remaining there in the capacities of Director of Studies and also Director of the Centre for the Arts and language EHESS-CNRS, until his death in 1992. In this period, he often returned to the US to teach at a number of universities. His unabashed delight in discovering philosophical conundrums and considerations brought him into contact with the pantheon of French Poststructuralist thinkers, many of them who became friends and colleagues, among them Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Michel Deguy, Jacques Derrida, Paolo Fabbri, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Serres, Paul Virilio and others. These friendships made in France and elsewhere propelled Marin to a dynamic and innovative exploration of a number of areas within and beyond the perspectives of Philosophy that informed his early studies.

It would not be unfounded to observe that Marin’s work is based first and foremost on narratology, particularly on the shape-shifting attributes of telling a story. The “what happened next?’ of a child’s questioning in hearing a story is always dynamic. What happened next is never the same as what happened the last time the story was told. Marin has a profound understanding of this apparently simple idea. And, furthermore, ‘what happened next’ takes the reader in vital and vigorous directions beyond “récit”, as Marin writes in “Biographie et foundation” (141) into a complex world of historical, textual, and theoretical aspects (142). Marin here is speaking of a particular text, namely the “Relation écrite par la Mère Angélique Arnauld sur Port-Royal précédée d’un avertis sement par une religieuse de Port-Royal”. The observation, however, holds beyond the “Relation”.  In fact, Marin’s understanding of how stories (and concomitantly, histories and historiographies) function is evident as early as the interview published in the journal Diacritics in 1977 in which he offers his responses, all relatively playful and uncomplicated, to a series of seven complex questions. He is “positively delighted” by the questions posed (Marin Diacritics, 53), because they offer an opportunity to explain the power of representation:

But this power, as it happens, is a listening trap, a reading trap, and once it is in place, this narrative institution, this representation functions in a strange fashion, and that is its power as play, its playfulness–its operation is only its undoing, its movement is only its turning-back, in the double sense of return: to come back to itself, to include itself in its product so as not to be exempt from the trap it sets; and to exhibit the other side of the coin, to turn itself over as one “reverses” a glove or a skin. (Ibid, 53)

According to Marin, there exists a narratological playing that does not stop with the telling of a story, but that probes into what is not told in order to show, subvert, and even revert the power behind the narration. To play with the story, is to play with the power of the story and thereby to interrogate it into revealing a new story, a new rich tapestry that informs our text. The coin of Marin’s example above is the same coin on both sides, but it carries all the more power, all the more meaning, when we flip it over. To see only one side of the coin, is to enter into a trap. To accept only one reading of a story, is also to enter into a trap of narrative.

He reiterates these concepts throughout his extensive writings, but they are especially well articulated, expanded and illustrated in three seminal works, Le récit est un piège (The Story is a Trap) and Portrait du roi, (Portrait of the King) and Sublime Poussin. In these three works we find the essential Marin.

In Le récit est un piège (1978), among his early works, he sets himself the task of exposing the underpinnings of a text in much the same way that he had done previously in speaking of painting in Détruire la peinture (1977). The “piège” is the narrative trap. It is the ineluctable consequence of any tale according to Marin. He begins with an analysis of fable writer Jean de La Fontaine’s whose “Power of the Tale” (Book VIII) is dedicated to King Louis XIV. Marin contends that from the outset how we, as readers, find ourselves in a power struggle of sorts with the text. If the text involves a trap, it stands to reason that there is a trapper and also a trapped. Is it the author/poet in the first instance and the reader in the second (Piège,8) who at all levels, [finds in] the excitement of a desire for knowledge, a desire for truth: the trap, the listening trap, the reading trap, the interpretation trap [Piège, 29]? Or, in a transgressive reversal of power, could the dynamic also work the other way around? The author/poet, after all, not only does not point to the knowledge, the truth, the reality [of a tale], but he declares that he himself, in showing and speaking the truth, is caught in the same desire as those who listen; he is captured by the same fiction of no other truth but that which he tells. And he takes pleasure in telling his tale. He satisfies his own desire, the desire of his reader through the imagining of a possible world through the power of fabrication. [Piège, 32]

The narrative insight into the understanding of such binary propositions is rendered still more complex as readers come to the realization that they are always contemplating an uncompleted text. We can never grasp the fullness of the text, as Jean Bellemin-Noël had shown in his work on text and avant-texte.[4] Marin himself would insist on this in his example of how an autobiography can never be fully complete to itself since it cannot inscribe within itself, a priori, the end or death of the autobiographical subject.[5] Thus, we arrive at an intriguing aporetic moment as we realize there is no clear-cut path through a tale despite the fiction of such a path.

A particularly illustrative example of Marin’s idea of the traps of narrative is found in the third essay of Le récit est un piège, entitled ‘La Guerre du Roi’. To interrogate the historical text, as Marin does here, is to usurp the power of the historical figure. Here, King Louis XIV, purportedly both the author and the subject of his own history, is clearly destabilized in this double role, for we know that it is actually the playwright Jean Racine who is writing the history, even as the king takes on the role of principal actor in the narrative. Although Marin makes only a brief allusion to them, others also recorded the events of Louis’ life: official historian Paul Pellisson and poet-satirist Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux.

 The king’s reliance on the text produced by a playwright (Racine), an accepted fabricator of events, rather than an official historian is intriguing to consider. What embellishments of fiction does Racine permit his story of King Louis that perhaps historiographers would not? Racine describes as if historically factually documented and correct how the king is welcomed in various areas of France, and in this he immediately upends the narrative of a king in his power.  Since Racine cannot recount in detail the complete history, how and why does he pick and choose the events that he does? He himself is highly motivated to present the king in the best possible light; what he does not say about the king’s welcome (or lack thereof) in the places he visits subtly points to this, undermining his narrative. His version of the king’s biography is one of consistent benevolent welcome among his subjects. Marin writes that behind the events recounted by Racine, there is also a temporal anteriority which is abstract and essential; it remains apart from the events, always transcendent to the historical moment of any event itself. It includes ethical and psychological considerations; it encompasses essential passions and intentions and involves the reputation and glory of the king; it also includes the jealousies of antagonists, their envy and admiration (Piège, 98). On one level, Racine’s narrative suggests a game of gaze, of the king seeing the other watching him. Marin, however, discerns that there is much more than a game of gaze and interpretation. Here he observes the play of power as well. Of course, the story is intended to show the power of the king, and the reader/watcher of this grand historical spectacle understands enough to accept the radiant glow of royal glory (Piège, 98). On the other hand, could it not be that the enemy is more powerful than the king given that it is conspicuously absent from a text in which the king must necessarily have an antagonist in order to declare himself triumphant? If there is no antagonist, over what or whom is the king triumphant?

As reader/spectators of the history of King Louis XIV we understand that the absence is a trap. The narrative is incomplete. Much more can be said. Alluding here to his future painterly work, Marin proposes this aporetic binary as a linguistic diptych created by the words of the narrator Racine, with on one side the king and on the other the enemy (Piège, 100). Paying close attention to the narrative structure that Racine employs, Marin shows how Racine’s after-the-fact writing (rendered  all the more complex by the unfortunately burned manuscript notes that compel the him to make up the facts for a second version retelling) is meant not to record history necessarily, but to offer the perception, the story, of a royal personage who is wise, has always been wise, discerning and prescient (Piège,109). As readers, we accept this trap of narrative.

Understanding the traps of narrative involves the appreciation of how power is represented overtly or subtly in art as well as literature. The visual arts embody sociopolitical enterprises; they are complicit in revealing power and, as Marin contends, power must be seen as being embodied in a powerful representative. Thus, he returns yet again to Racine and the latter’s version of the life of Louis XIV by way of explication.

Portrait of the King continues some of the work of La critique du discours: Etudes sur la Logique de Port-Royal et les Pensées de Pascal (1975), a study that has been the focus of much academic and critical attention. Reflecting on the seminal work of early modern philosophers Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole in La Logique ou l’art de penser (1662), and on the themes and observations with Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (ca.1660), Marin offers a keen analysis of how language functions through its constitutive elements: the word, the sentence, the text. He proposes a tripartite perspective: pedagogical, theological, and logical. In addition, he presents a deliberation on sign and signification through the Eucharistic words of “This is my body”, which for him become the site of the intersectionality of language, theology, and ideology. He shows how Pascal’s Pensées offer further reflections on how signs are organized in their relationship with each other in order to make meaning. Using his studies in La critique du discours as a point of departure, in Portrait of the King Marin expands on the earlier work enriching his studies with additional considerations of how power is represented, now using Louis XIV to exemplify the power of representation, as he had previously in Le récit est un piège (But as the title of this later work indicates, in Portrait of the King Marin aims to look more closely at the personage of the king himself.) Marin holds that Louis XIV’s bold statement that “L’état c’est moi” is no less powerful and equally declarative of power as Christ’s “This is my body”. The power embodied in the king expands beyond his corporeal personage and is reflected in any and all artistic endeavours in which the king is represented. The king is offered to history and historiography as a sacramental body. Whether or not the king is shown in his physical completeness, or just in part (through his image, his writing, in stories), his power is understood as always being embodied in its fullness even in the fragments or partial representations. The king is simultaneously there and not there and always in the entirety of his power.

Returning to his study of narrative traps, Marin focuses on the commutative concept of the narrative of power and the power of narrative (Portrait, 42) He supports his observations with further examples from Jean de La Fontaine, as he had done in Le Récit, but now he also includes fabulist Charles Perrault, as well as a map of Paris, the Louvre, the Petit Trianon, and the eponymous king’s portrait. Stylistically, it becomes obvious that Marin as author/philosopher is himself deeply committed to exploring the traps of narrative and resolving them if possible. Or, at least naming them. One particularly illustrative example in this book focuses on Racine’s speech welcoming Jacques-Nicolas Colbert, abbot of Bec-Hellouin, as the newest member of the French Academy. Marin summarizes Racine’s conundrum: he must eulogize Colbert without displacing or even ignoring King Louis XIV as receiver of eulogies. And he must do this without repeating the eulogizing of the King that Colbert had just completed in his own acceptance speech. Marin writes of the solution that exposes the trap Racine finds himself in, and how the playwright ingeniously resolves it:

By declaring that the eulogy has already been made, and well made, by the newly elected member, by ‘pretending not to want to talk about it, all while having already mentioned it’, Racine inscribes in his discourse this absent and past eulogy and sets it as his own…[framing] this discourse of praise in the paradigm of the king’s historical narrative… [Portrait,115]

Marin wonders about the continuing perception of such a historical narrative. It is not about the king, but it will always be understood as if it were about the king. The king himself may be absent but the story is a representation of both his body and of the power embodied there, forever absolute in the representation.

After the publication of Le Portrait du roi in 1981, Marin continued his deep involvement in his teaching duties in France and in the USA, producing articles and participating in semiotics conferences, especially at Urbino, Italy where he had first travelled with Algirdas Greimas at the very start of his research and studies.[6] Always a scholar with multiple interests, and a reflective and challenging writer, he published widely, predominantly in France. The dichotomous excursus into the representation of power and the power of representation continued to intrigue him and he returned to the topic, including in the numerous areas that appealed to his polymath pursuits. His bibliography of works records studies on More’s Utopia, on Dante, on biblical parables, Rabelais, Disneyland, Stendhal, on phatic/telephone function and on museum spaces, among other themes.[7] Over the years, the list of his studies is also a testament to his interest in the visual arts, particularly, in his considerations of works by artists such as Charles Le Brun, Phillippe de Champaigne, Paul Klee and Caravaggio. One of his most outstanding works, however, focused on Nicolas Poussin.

Sublime Poussin was published posthumously in 1995 but Marin’s critical involvement with the painter is actually among his first studies and, though never published, was the topic of a contribution to a panel at the Secondo Seminario internazionale: Le Strutture narrative, held in Urbino in 1968. The 17^th century artist continued to intrigue Marin for the rest of his career.  In fact, Marin had drawn up an outline for a monograph study as early as 1988. The book, finally compiled by a number of scholars from Marin’s individual essays, draws on these, offering the considerations, conundrums, and questions that Marin discovered and reflected upon through much of his work; in a way, it is an overview of all of Marin’s academic interests through the lens of Poussin. Sublime Poussin tells us about Marin even as it analyzes the works of Poussin. In urging us to “read” the visual works of Poussin, Marin allows us to “read” the scholar Marin as well.

Simply but eloquently articulated, the essays of this volume reiterate that painting can be a discourse or text and that, as such, the canvas may be “read” in the awareness that while art historians are often necessarily bound by the parameters of their academic traditions, writers of fictional prose and poetry need not take these same limits into consideration in their reading of a painting.

Marin does not write fiction or poetry, and he is not a historian of visual art. Nonetheless, as a semiotician, he demonstrates a keen sensitivity to art pieces. As a contemplator of art through the lens of semiotics, he is clearly compelled by the myriad meanings of artistic depictions and how we read these (Sublime, 5) especially since “[a]fter all, the term ‘reading’ is immediately applicable to books; can we say the same for pictures?”(Ibid). He explores what might be the theoretical premises that underlie both literature and painting, the legible and the visible, attempting to understand how “the dimensions in which the legible and the visible aspects of a picture are variously linked and contrasted.”( Sublime, 6) Seeing a possible connection to the Port-Royale logicians, Marin recalls how for them, to look at a picture as an iconic representamen is also to give it an immediate “reading”. On the other hand, is it possible to “understand” paintings as we understand sentences and propositions? Do the figures of a painting lend themselves to analysis as signs or as tropes? Marin finds that there is a spontaneous “telling” of the painting that takes place, quite deliberately, already at the surface level. Once described, the painting is no longer simply a text or discourse that produces pleasure but rather it presents an opportunity for many successive readings (Sublime, 30). He proposes as his example one of Poussin’s landscapes. When art critic Anthony Blunt, “read” this painting, he assigned it a name indicative of its principal marks or signs; he named the painting Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. Other critics have also viewed the same painting: theologian and teacher, Fénelon in the Dialogues des morts of 1712 (in which there is a fictional exchange regarding this painting between Leonardo da Vinci and Poussin) and in three texts taken from Entretiens sur le vies des plus excellens peintres (1666) by chronicler André Félibien; furthermore, there is an additional legend found for Etienne Baudetis’ engraving of Poussin’s piece. In reading the painting, we soon see beyond its primary circumstance, namely the man asphyxiated by a snake, upon which Blunt has focused; we begin to speculate on what lies “behind” the painting. None of our readings will ever be complete, however, even if we rely on expert glosses such as those by the critics named above. For example, the commentaries give no indication as to the function of the central figure of the canvas, the only woman, on whose face we recognize horror and terror. Marin stops at this figure, fascinated to study her because her very presence, perhaps epideictic, creates a problematic for us: she cannot see from her standpoint where we as ‘readers’ direct our gaze, namely on the dead man with the enormous snake still wrapped around him. Her inclusion in the painting has created a signifying gap, showing how beyond the textual descriptions of the painting there remains hidden a signifying polyvalence.

Marin’s concern with the power of representation and the representation of power is not overlooked in this study. In a subsequent chapter he describes two self-portraits executed by Poussin. He begins by relying on a textual discourse, namely the correspondence of Poussin with renowned patron of the arts Paul Fréart de Chantelou regarding the two canvasses. The latter had asked Poussin for a painting of himself, but Poussin was unable to find any painter to carry out this request. He determined instead to produce a self-portrait; but in fact, he painted two of them. On 20 June 1649 he wrote to Chantelou about the two works promising that “I shall send you the one that comes out best, but you must say nothing about it, please, to avoid causing any jealousy” (Sublime, 184) He leaves unsaid who will be jealous, although subsequent correspondence points to a rivalry between Chantelou and businessman Jean Pointel. And despite the fact that the portraits are of the same subject, by the same painter, at the same moment of his life, the two are distinguished by their subjectively qualitative difference: one, according to Poussin, is better than the other. They are not simply copies or near copies of each other. The artist refers as well to his hesitation and to his difficulties in painting his own self because in doing so, he is compelled to pass from being a subject to being an object, and in his case, because there were two portraits, from one subject to two objects, one of which is better than the other. Marin grasps the rich semiotic possibilities of this point. He proceeds with a detailed analysis of how to “read” the two portraits, and focuses, finally, on the gaze of the painter-subject and that of the viewer. He shows how, in the Chantelou self portrait of 1650, we are co-opted into following the gaze of the objectified subject. We return his gaze, but we can see so much more, for he cannot see the drama of the half-hidden canvasses behind him. At the same time, we can imitate his ignorance of the drama with our own gap in knowledge because the female figure in the background canvas, the one he is unable to see, is also gazing out at someone whose arms are stretched out to her, someone we, like the artist-subject, cannot see. In effect, what we see and cannot see in the background is the story of painting, according to Marin, for the half-hidden figure allows us to understand that there does exist an additional story of the painting and of its painter (Sublime, 208). In this we find an ingenious interplay of the power of representation and the representation of power. Viewer/reader, painted female figure and absent interlocutor of the woman all hold some power towards understanding the painting, but in each case it is an incomplete power, confounded all the more because the artist considered one of the paintings to be the better one.

Here is an example of the sublime in Poussin, that moment of recognition of both the construction and deconstruction, of reading a discourse for what is there and for what is not there. In the final essay of the volume, where Marin summarizes his studies of the nature of the sublime in France in the 1670s, he refers to an aspect of “je ne sais quoi” of the sublime, a notion that is not merely an abstract and perhaps banal phrasing, but is actually viewed as problematic, vis-à-vis the idea of the sublime as it is explored in various 17^th century French treatises, and specifically in Dominique Bouhours’ Entretiens d’Artiste et d’Eugene (1671). That the phrase “je ne sais quoi” may be applied to the sublime already points to the fact that it is impossible to construct the sublime as a concept. Marin continues: “It is easy to re-cognize the sublime in discourse, in a poem or a painting, but this re-cognition is in exact proportion to its theoretical indefinability, the impossibility of producing rules for the construction of its concept”( Sublime, 211) In the 1670s, the question of the sublime is posed through the attempt to integrate the marvelous, with the mechanics of representation. The element of the “je ne sais quoi”, according to Marin, is what betrays the sublime as an aesthetic motif. According to Bouhours, the marvelous is the union of two terms or two thoughts that initially seem incompatible; it causes both astonishment and pleasure at once. Marin puts it in slightly different terms that are just as valid: the sublime is the sense of acceptance of both the construction and deconstruction, of reading a discourse for what is there and for what is not there.

Throughout his works, Marin remained loyal to the main concepts of his philosophical and semiotic enquiries. After his death in 1992, in addition to Sublime Poussin, further works have appeared emphasizing how important these themes were to him and reiterating his understanding of how the history of humankind is deeply and ineluctably informed through the reading and interpretation of our cultural texts, no matter how they appear to us, no matter how we may read them. Derrida, who in the quote above eulogized Marin the friend, also offered an unmistakeable reaffirmation of the scholarly and social importance of Marin’s body of academic work that could remain as his epigraph:

In what he then gives to think, to read or reread, there is philosophy, first and always. This was his first training and his constant concern, of course. This deep and lucid thinker is first of all a philosopher of great stature, open to the vastest, most diverse fields, in their very expansion.[8]

[1] http://www.louismarin.fr/2019/05/30/liber-n-12-1992-pierre-bourdieu-jacques-derrida/

[2] http://www.louismarin.fr/2019/05/30/liber-n-12-1992-pierre-bourdieu-jacques-derrida/

[3] Derrida, Jacques. “By Force of Mourning”, Critical Inquiry 22, 2 (1996), 171. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/448788

[4] Bellemin-Noël, Jean. Le Texte et l’avant-texte, Larousse, 1972.

[5] Marin, Louis. (1979). The “I” as Autobiographical Eye: Reading Notes on a Few Pages of Stendhal’s “Life of Henry Brulard”, October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 65-79 https://www.jstor.org/stable/778322

[6] http://www.louismarin.fr/biographie/

[7] Marin, Françoise and Fabre, Pierre-Antoine, « Bibliographie de Louis Marin », Littérature, Octobre 1993 pp. 105-126  https://www.jstor.org/stable/41713241

[8] http://www.louismarin.fr/2019/05/30/liber-n-12-1992-pierre-bourdieu-jacques-derrida/